


Why Did You Think It Was A Good Idea?

by Briarwitch



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Spoilers, after weirdmaggedon, fanfic of a fanfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-09
Updated: 2017-09-09
Packaged: 2018-12-25 17:12:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,292
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12040476
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Briarwitch/pseuds/Briarwitch
Summary: This takes place after by_veidt's fic, This was a Bad Idea. You can read this without reading that....but it won't make a lot of sense. By_veidt's great anyways, so go read his stuff. SPOILER WARNING: This is going to reference some stuff in This was a Bad Idea. If you don't want anything spoiled, don't read this first.Dipper and Mabel deal with being back home after a summer of adventure. Bill stops by for some information.





	Why Did You Think It Was A Good Idea?

**Author's Note:**

  * For [by_veidt](https://archiveofourown.org/users/by_veidt/gifts).



Eighth grade was proving to be… interesting. No, frustrating was more like. History class wasn’t going well for Dipper, especially after he had gotten his painstakingly researched report on the cover up of the eighth and a half president of the United States handed back with a D. Mrs. Shultz had said it “Didn’t seem like his own work,” which was ridiculous. He’d spent most of dinner explaining to his family just why it was ridiculous, but that had ended when his father had told him that he had to listen to his teacher and maybe to pick a less controversial subject next time.

“Sorry Bro-bro,” Mabel said after dinner. She was sitting on the floor of Dipper’s room, leaning against Waddles’ side. The pot belly pig had gotten bigger since the summer, and Mabel couldn’t lift him anymore. Mom hadn’t liked the idea of a pig in the house, but Dad had said that a pet of her own would teach Mabel to be more serious, and so Waddles had stayed. Good thing too—Mabel would have gotten right back on that bus and rode another twelve plus hours back to Gravity Falls if she hadn’t been allowed to keep her pig. “Dad’s just…”

“A huge jerk?” Dipper asked, sighing as he put his head down on his desk. He looked up and ran a finger down the spin of journal number four. Only a few pages were filled out—it was the journal that Grunkle Ford had used to trick Bill, back during weridmaggedon. There were some notes about the algorithm that had destroyed the weirdness field around gravity falls, and indivertibly sucked Bill Cipher back into his own dimension. And of course, the detailed instructions on the ritual that the twins and Grunkle Stan had needed to perform to save Ford, after Bill had dragged him through the rift with him.

Impossibly, it had all worked out. Ford was safe, and he and Stan were getting along surprisingly well, if their video calls from the middle of the Atlantic were anything to go by. The world was saved from Bill, the Mystery Shack was in one piece…

…And Dipper and Mabel were back home, with parents that didn’t understand, unfair teachers, and nothing more perilous than normal, human bullies to deal with.

“I miss Ford,” Dipper said. “He would have loved my report.”

“I miss Grunkle Stan,” Mabel piped up. “He never said that macaroni art wasn’t a sophisticated enough medium. Pffft. I am the most sophisticated.”

Dipper swiveled his desk chair around. “Did someone say that to you?”

“Yeah, the art teacher, Mr. Cohee.” Mabel sat up straight and pulled out her paint splotched sweater, better displaying the Technicolor skull and crossed paintbrushes that had been crocheted into the knitting. “I even wore my fancy art sweater! Tasteless philistine.”

Dipper laughed and threw a wadded up piece of paper at her. “At least you’re apparently paying attention in English class.”

Mable laughed and returned fire, and they spent the next few minutes throwing wadded up homework at each other.

“It will be summer again before you know it,” Mabel said. “Then we can be back in Gravity Falls, and we’ll have both Grunkles all summer. Can you imagine? Two Grunkles, Dipper, two!”

“You’re right,” Dipper said, remembering what Ford had said, about eighth grade and highschool not really mattering. He just had to survive a few bad teachers, and keep learning on his own. “I hope they bring us back something cool from the Atlantic.”

“Oooh, like a new merman,” Mabel said, her eyes sparkling.

Dipper groaned.

 

Dipper drifted out of dreams of using the presidential key on a chest of sunken treasure, thinking vaguely that he had heard someone walking towards him. He turned over, half asleep, and wondered just how to get the barnacles out of the keyhole of the chest. The glowing face of his digital clock proclaimed the time to be just after one in the morning.  
Somewhere on the other side of the room, a page turned. Dipper closed his eyes and tried to drift back to sleep. Another page turned. What’s Mabel doing reading at this hour?” Dipper thought. Then he remembered that they were back home, and he and Mabel had separate rooms.

Dipper sat up in bed. The glow from his clock and the light coming in from his window was more than enough to see Mabel by. She sat at his desk with her back to him.  
“Mabel?” Dipper asked, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. “What are you doing?”

Mabel turned her head slightly, enough so that Dipper knew she had heard him but not enough to show her face. She turned back, ignoring him, and flipped another page. “AH,” she said.

Dipper frowned, suddenly feeling uneasy. Something about Mabel’s voice sounded…wrong. And why was she ignoring him?

“Mabel?” he asked, crawling forward on the bed.

“Go BACK to sleEP Dipper.”

Dipper’s breath caught in his throat, suddenly very much awake. That wasn’t Mabel’s voice, but he knew it. But no, that wasn’t possible. “That’s not funny Mabel,” he said, voice breaking in his sudden panic.

Mabel chuckled and nudged the desk with her foot, letting the wheelie chair slowly spin around to reveal her face and her yellow, slit pupiled eyes, which glowed softly in the dimness of the room. 

Dipper yelped and scrambled backwards, bumping against his headboard. “Bill!” he cried, somehow still surprised, despite his suspicions. He hadn’t actually thought… Bill shouldn’t have been able to…

But there he was, looking out from behind Mabel’s eyes, a thick book open in his stolen hands. Not just any book either—even in the dark, Dipper could recognize journal number four from across the room.

“In the STOLEN flesh,” Bill said. “How’s it goiNG kid? Enjoying not being trapped in a nightMARE dimension?”

Fear quickly turned to anger, and Dipper glanced around the room, knowing that he wouldn’t be able to see Mabel in the mindscape, but still looking anyway. “Get out of my sister you demented triangle!” Dipper demanded, pointing a finger at Bill. “If you’ve hurt her…”

“YEESH kid, calm down,” Bill said, waving Mabel’s hand through the air. “Bright Star’s FINE, she’s still sleepING.” Bill cackled. “Having a nice dreAM about a merman—you can get people to shake and agree to LOTS OF THINGS while they’re dreaming.”

“Mabel never would have shaken your hand!”

“Who sAID I looked like myself?”

Dipper opened his mouth to insult Bill again, only to pause. “Wait,” he said, frowning. “How are you even here? Uncle Ford defeated you; you got banished from earth forever.”

“Ah-AH, I got locked out of Gravity Falls forever… just out of Gravity Falls.” Mabel’s face split into a huge grin, her braces glinting in the dim light. “Good thing NONE of you actually stayed in Gravity Falls, eh DIPPER Now SHUT UP for a second while I finish this.” Mabel’s head bent back over the book in her hands.

Dipper scrambled to the end of the bed. “I’m not going to let you…did you just call me Dipper?” Dipper blinked, confused. “Why?”

Bill slowly brought Mabel’s hands together, closing the journal with a snap. “Because that’s your name,” he said innocently, that huge grin still plastered over Mabel’s face.

Dipper narrowed his eyes. No, no way—Bill never called him by his real name, something was up. “What happened to Pine Tree?” he asked suspiciously.

“Oh, you’re STILL Pine Tree, I’m just going to NEED you to be Dipper.” Bill rubbed Mabel’s hands together gleefully. “Now tell ME—where did ‘ol Sailboat get to, EH?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, and even If I did I wouldn’t—!”

Something suddenly rapped on the floor. “Go to sleep Dipper!” came his dad’s muffled, tired voice. Dipper glared at Bill, who simply continued to grin.

“You cAn’t stop me, KID. In the mindscape, I’m all-powERfull.” He threw the journal like a frisbe, and it landed on the bed next to Dipper. “See you in your drEAms!” Bill called cheerfully. Then Mabel suddenly slumped backwards over the chair, and Dipper scrambled from the bed to get to her side.

“Mabel! Mabel! Wake up!” Dipper hissed, shaking his twin. Her eyes scrunched tighter, and she muttered something. Dipper pinched her arm.

“Ow!” Mabel exclaimed in her own voice. She opened her eyes, her perfectly normal, brown eyes. She frowned at Dipper and sat up, looking around the darkened room. “Uhh… what’s going on?”

“Oh thank god,” Dipper said, hugging Mabel tight. “How do you feel? Are you okay?”

“Erk, other than you squeezing my guts out, fine,” Mabel gasped. “Why am I in your room?”

Dipper quickly told her about what had happened, watching her go pale. She rolled up the sleeves of her nightgown and prodded her arms. “No fork marks,” she said, shuddering.

“He must have come straight here to read the journal.”

“But why?” Mabel asked, her forehead puckering in thought. “He doesn’t need a body to read.”

Dipper shook his head and started pacing back and forth. “I’ve been in the mindscape, you can’t touch anything there. Well, except for puppets, I guess.” He paused for a moment to frown. “Huh, weird, never thought about that.” He rubbed his chin and started back and forth again. “But the point is, if Bill wanted to read the journal, he would have needed someone to open it for him. It’s not like I leave it lying around, and when it is open I’m usually filling out the pages, not reading the algorithm. I don’t really know what any of the math means.”

“So Bill was looking at the zodiac?”

“Huh?” Dipper looked up. Mabel had moved to sit on the bed, and she had the journal open in her lap. “No probably the algorithm,” Dipper said. “The zodiac isn’t in there.”

“Uh, but we used the zodiac to bring Ford back.”

“What? No, the zodiac is for de-summoning Bill.” Dipper’s frown deepened, and he crossed to the bed. “Let me see that.”

He sat up next to his sister and she pushed half of the book onto his lap, pointing to the page she had opened. It was the page that showed the ritual that they had used to pull Ford back from Bill’s dimension. Now that Mabel mentioned it though, it did look like the zodiac. There was the circle, a triangle drawn in the center. The difference was that, instead of thirteen, the ring was cut up into three large pieces, and the symbols inside the pieces…

Dipper pointed to the little sailboat. “Bill asked something about a sailboat,” he said slowly. “He wanted to know where it was.” Next to the sail boat was a star, and Dipper moved his finger over it. “And he didn’t call you ‘Shooting Star,’ he called you ‘Bright Star,’ and…” Dipper gasped and held the book closer to his face. The last symbol was the Little Dipper. 

“What? What?” Mabel asked, pulled the book down.

“Bill called me ‘Dipper,’ Mabel, He used my real nickname, I thought. But no, look.” Dipper jabbed his finger at the illustration. “You me and Stan, we summoned Ford back, so we’re Ford’s zodiac, and if Bill’s zodiac de-summons him…”

Mabel’s eyes widened. “He’s gonna try and de-summon Grunkle Ford,” she whispered. “Dipper, he’s trying to pull him back to his dimension!”

The twins stared at each other in the darkened room.

“Dipper, what are we going to do?” Mabel asked softly.

“I…I don’t know,” Dipper said, staring blankly down at the book.

 

“Uh-uh, uh-hUH, come on BRATS,” Bull muttered to himself, hovering unseen above the heads of the younger set of Pines twins. “Call up Sixfingers and WARN him, come on, puppets.”

The door creaked open, and all three of the room’s occupants looked up. 

“Mrro?” asked the fluffy, dark gray cat. It fixed its yellow eyes on Bill and hissed softly.

Bill frowned. “Mind your own bUSSiness, flEAbag.”

“It’s okay, Fluffy,” Mabel said, making kissy noises with her lips and patting the bed next to her. “Come here.”

“NO Fluffy, go AWay!” Bill yelled, flying at the door.

Fluffy bolted, vanishing into the dark hallway. Bill turned back to the Pines twins, scowling as they looked nervously around the room. “STUpid cat,” he muttered.

Mabel burrowed into the recesses of her nightgown, stretching the picture of Saturn. “I don’t like this Dipper,” she said. “Maybe we should call Grunkle Ford…”

“Yeah Dipper, let’s call GrunKLE FORD,” Bill said, flying back to the bed. It hadn’t been hard to find Pine Tree and Shooting Star—or rather, Dipper and Bright Star, as he had  
learned. He knew all about Dipper’s life after being in his head, and thus known all about Piedmont. Sixer and Sailboat though, they had vanished. And sure, with patience and time he could find them, but why wait? Hadn’t he done enough waiting?

“We need to at least warn him,” Dipper agreed, sliding of the bed. He pulled a laptop from the lower shelf of his bedside table, Bill eagerly ghosting behind him. 

“Come ON,” Bill muttered as the twins huddled around the computer, waiting for the call to go through. 

“What time is it there?” Mabel whispered after a few minutes.

“I don’t—Grunkle Stan!”Dipper exclaimed as Sailboat appeared suddenly on the screen, his fez swapped out for a red beanie.

“YES!” Bill cried, leaping into the computer. Being made of pure energy had its perks, especially since humans had connected the entire world with their technology. “Hope you MISSED me Sixer!” Bill thought gleefully in the nano-second it took to travel through the internet connection. “Here I COME!”


End file.
